for i am who you used to love
by afastmachine
Summary: After all is said and done, what does that leave behind? Spoilers for 5x08 and spoilers/speculation for the back half of the season.


Hook has slept in the same places for as long as he can remember. The captain's bunk for most of his life, and in the officer's quarters before that. He didn't stay much in taverns or inns, only when a woman would pull him up the stairs and into a room.

This, however, is one place he hasn't slept before.

Bright light fills the room, flimsy curtains doing little to block the morning sun. Now that there's light and he has a moment, he takes in the room around him. Last night had been dark and far too hurried for his tastes, but they had needed each other so much he hadn't tried to stop her or slow himself down.

There's a bookshelf in the corner, and a painting on the wall of the sea caught in a storm. It doesn't seem like something Emma would have in her room, but then again, this room isn't exactly Emma's. It was supposed to be _theirs_.

Trying to move as little as possible, he turns his head to look at her. His arm is trapped under her pillow, which is trapped under her head, blonde hair tousled and twisted but back to the golden-yellow he loves. Her skin is pale, but not unnaturally so, and he wants to touch her and kiss her and love her again and again.

Like he had last night, fingers digging into each other's skin as they came together the first time, all their pain and suffering and anger poured into whatever they could find with each other.

He doesn't really know how to feel about everything now. He loves her, gods, he does. She is branded onto his soul, and he is quite sure he is branded onto hers. She made him a good man again, but she made him into the monster he swore he would destroy.

And then she saved him again, and he wishes he could erase the betrayal, the moment he realized that it was all true, that she had truly bound him to the sword, but he can't. It's all gone now, but the scar is a fresh wound, tender and red.

So here he is, laying in her( _their_ ) bed, in a house he picked out for her, and he doesn't know what to do next.

He looks at her, at the soft brush of sunlight against her skin, the smudges under her eyes where her makeup had run and she had rubbed it furiously, trying to erase the weakness. There are bruises on her shoulder, ones that he left there, biting and sucking until she cried out under him.

He wants to talk to her, to sort it all out, to hear her promise she's sorry.

(It won't be enough for him.)

He wants to get up and run, too, to slip into his clothes, what's left of them, and return to his ship. A coward's way out, for sure, but he has never been here before. He knows how to love, and he knows how to hate, and he knows how to do each with every fiber of his being, with every second of his life and every beat of his heart.

He doesn't know how to live with both at the same time.

And perhaps he doesn't hate her, perhaps he got all his true anger out before, before the Underworld and before she saved him. It feels like such a memory, though it wasn't that long ago. They had only tumbled back home yesterday, and only into each other's arms last night.

It feels like a lifetime ago, and yet he feels the pain as sure as the moment it had surged to life inside of him, as sharp as the day he'd lost his hand and the long sleepless nights that had followed it.

She saved him once(twice, three times), and he wants to let her save him again.

(He doesn't know if he can.)

(He does know he would never leave, for all that he might wish to, he exists in her orbit, drawn to her as though she were a siren, and indeed, she is. He would never leave, but he can't stay.)

The storm on the wall mocks him, and he feels as though he is caught in the very painting.

Her back rises and falls, inhales and exhales, soft breathing untroubled by his thoughts, surprisingly untroubled by anything. Perhaps she had seen it all as forgiven, but he is not so sure. She knows betrayal, she knows her parents loved her and yet they left her, she knows the struggle to forgive.

She would understand, he knows, if he told her he needed time, to sort this out. If he told her he would sail away she would watch him go. Both of them know she has no right to keep him, not again.

(Last night, she had begged him, too, to never leave her again, and perhaps she was delirious, words slipping past her tongue just as easily as the moans that followed, but he had promised he wasn't leaving.

So he won't.)

He just doesn't know how to let go.

Three hundred years it took to let go of the searing pain he'd felt when he'd lost the only woman he'd ever loved, and even then, his vengeance burned strong still. It's complicated now, more than ever, and unsatisfied, but it does not call his name anymore, or haunt his steps.

They don't have three hundred years, though, for him to forgive her. They only have whatever time they can make for themselves.

He loves her, though. He loves her.

He repeats it to himself until it's all he can hear.


End file.
